In my home university, most business classes on summer/winter session are given lessons on-line and most of classes have a group assignment so I familiar with virtual team (Even though I couldn’t realize that I participated in virtual team at that time, I’m convinced of virtual team when I read article). Student by themselves made a community to do their assignment that they post their materials and opinions and they discuss about the subject through messenger.

I think virtual team is more convenient than face-to-face work in aspect of physical. You can save the time because you don’t have to go to meeting place in person. You just need laptop and cable for Internet! And you can write your opinion on community whenever you want to do. In addition, you feel more comfortable to express your thought (I think it’s is the best advantage of virtual team because I often feel a difficulty to talk about my thought to others watching their eyes). You don’t have to meet them in person so you can more freely to participate in discuss their thought through internet. If virtual team applies for business meeting, it will be effective way to improve employees’ ability more creatively for discussing group meeting.

When I did group assignment with virtual team, our group was just 3 people including me but one person didn’t participate in doing assignment at all. In the end, my friend and I were compelled to write a 30 pages paper without the help of him and we got A+ on the paper with him. At that time, I was very angry the fact which he got the same grade with my friend and me without doing lift a hand.

From my experience, therefore, it’s important to make plan accurately such as allotting a part of assignment and setting their participation and each person have to have a responsibility to do work together through on-line. Trust and responsibility are most important element to success in their virtual team.

Mom, I'm also journalist!

When I was in Korea, major newspapers in Korea enraged readers because they often disregarded and wrote the article opposite readers’ opinions. These major newspapers only dealt with government’s opinion. Thus, many people built up a campaign against these newspaper and many people try to make their own news on their blogs or other newspaper sites. Through this process, I can know civil journalism.

(Ohmynews is the most famouse news site as civil journalism in Korea. Left: Korean Right: International)

By development on Internet, civil journalism is famous concept in these days. People are not passive readers on newspapers any longer. They can write out article that express their thought by themselves. Through these active by readers, the influence of existing newspapers is decreasing than before when they leaded people’s opinion about the society.

Sometimes civil journalism is the place where the unconfirmed rumors are spread out and lack of information filtering makes problems which people believe the wrong truth about the celebrity or corporation such as Steve Jobs.

However, I think civil journalism is a good phenomenon of internet. First, newspapers should get out of their misunderstanding that they can control people’s thought through their existing power of influence and then have to try to co-opt with their readers. Second, the social issues which are ignored or neglected by traditional newspaper can be known and make attention among people. Especially, the matter of censorship within one country or the unknown global issues according to the power of country such as the war in the world can be known to the general public. Therefore, civil journalism can be easy to obtain a diversity of information in the world and disclose information more transparency among the readers so it’s difficult to cover up the issues. Furthermore, people can get a variety of sight about the matter.

How about your social networking on the internet?

In these days, it’s important to make various relationships with many people and make the relationship to be deeper and longer. People consider managing their relationship with other people as important ability in these days than old days. Kyunglim Park who is celebrity in Korea published her essay about social networking and became bestseller in Korea because she is known as one of people who have far-reaching relationship with various status people and people want to know how she makes and manages her relationship.(when she got marry, 5000 visitor attended her wedding!)

Many people want to control their social networking more efficiently and especially the social networking based on internet makes easier to manage their networking. By one click, you can send email easily to everyone on your list. In addition, social networking based on internet reduced the effort to find information because people own the information about anything in common on the internet.

When I was in Korea, I was looking for an apartment to live in Washington and then someone let me know the site, cragslist. Suddenly I wondered how I can be sure the fact is true or not so I couldn’t trust the information about apartment.

This is problem! We can’t trust the information on the internet and always doubt the opinions what you are looking for. Furthermore, the strength of social relationship is much weaker than real society relationship. When I receive the email, we can immediately distinguish this email thought about me or just send email for people on the list. On the internet, people always distrust the information and their relationship so it’s difficult to build and maintain the trust among the people. However, I think it’s unavoidable the lack of trust on the internet because people can’t personally meet each other. For these reason, to solve the problem about the trust on the internet which is another society in web 2.0 ages needs the regulation about the information and effort among people without infringement of one's freedom.

Photos credits to :

http://imagesearch.naver.com/detail/frame_top_080722.html#

Can we protect our privacy on the internet?

When we start facebook, myspace, and cyworld, these sites request us to put our profile based on the truth. However, how many people really write down their profile honestly? Nearly half (46%) say they give at least some false information. Many people who especially are living in an age where Life is an Open Book Test are worried about that how we can protect our information through internet without any defensive measure.

In Korea, leaking personal information frequently happen and mainly celebrity becomes the target of leaking personal information but sometimes a mediocrity can be the target. What is more serious thing is that the person who acts incomprehensibly is the target for witch-hunting on the internet. Furthermore, many people put on the information about that person like his/her mane, cyworld address, cell phone and which school he/she attends like this.

Finally, one man who many internet users thought the person hit his girlfriend severely sued the portal site (Daum which is big portal site secondly in Korea) because Daum didn’t do anything to protect leaking his profiles through comments on-line. After that matter, he couldn’t live ordinary life since many internet users called to him or his office/house. In the end, the man won the court which said the portal let the negative and contained personal information comments on the internet but they have responsibility to manage comments on the internet.

If we cannot make safe defensive measure to protect from lifting personal information, people would like to put the false information on their profile. How can we are trust the other aspect of the internet such as comments, rates and can do the things such as conversational marketing based on confidence have really meaning about the offered information on the internet?